The word “ascension” shot terror up Illium’s spine any time someone spoke it in relation to him. He had no desire, none, to become an archangel. Maybe that would change in the future, and maybe it wouldn’t, but one thing was true: he was too young for it to even be a whispered idea. The power would tear him apart. Even should he somehow survive—so remote a possibility as to be negligible—he’d be eaten alive by those of the Cadre who had no reason to care for him or call him a friend.
But the worst casualty of all would be having to leave the Tower, the Seven.
No, Illium was not on board with any talk of ascension. As a result, he’d been quite happy to watch Suyin ascend on the far end of the war. She might be untried, but she was thousands of years older than him, had a grace and a maturity that he was still in the process of developing.
He could be envious of her relationship with Aodhan and still accept her qualifications as a member of the Cadre—and more specifically, as archangel of this ravaged territory. This land needed an architect, a builder, far more than it needed an archangel of warrior blood.
As for Titus, despite his misgivings about the accelerated speed of Illium’s power curve, the archangel had treated him with the respect due to a warrior of his skill and experience. There’d also been no formalities at his table, the three of them eating as family.
Even prior to Illium’s mother’s entanglement with Titus, the other archangel’s table had been easy. Nothing could be like it was when Raphael got together with his Seven, but it had been close.
Neha’s table, by contrast, was a thing of formal manners, every dish a work of art. Elijah’s table fell somewhere in between—the familiarity of a warrior at ease in his home, but with a touch of elegance in the presentation. To be expected, since his consort was an artist.
Suyin’s table reminded him of Dmitri’s stories of how things had been when Raphael first became an archangel. Young and untried and with a furious intensity to him, as he learned to rule the land that was his territory.
The table at which they were to sit today was a huge slab of wood on sturdy legs. It had been sandpapered to take off the roughness, but that was about the extent of the polishing. Illium didn’t need to ask why Suyin wasn’t using the formal table that must surely exist in this stronghold.
All the polish and shine would’ve brought Lijuan into the room with them.
This table represented Suyin alone.
Two long bench seats ran along either side, while at the head of the table was a single chair built for an angel. Four warriors were already at the table when he entered and they waved him over.
He knew Xan, of course, but hadn’t yet managed to catch up with the other familiar face. His own cracked into a huge smile. “I heard you’d joined Suyin’s court,” he said after exchanging the embrace of warriors with a small bronze-skinned woman with wings of a blue so dark they were near-black.
Yindi would have the perfect wings for spying if she didn’t have large splashes of white on the primaries. Also if she wasn’t so loud and exuberant. He always had a good time with her when they met—the previous time around, they’d gone ice-flying below a massive glacier, nearly frozen off their butts, then drunk copious amounts of Illium’s potent liquor.
“A better decision I’ve never made,” she said, before introducing him to the vampire and the angel he didn’t know.
Jae was the vampire, quiet but with a glint to her eye, Maximus the angel. And a bigger angel Illium had never met. The other man was more heavily muscled than Titus or Aegaeon, his body white marble sculpted to define every possible line. It was a wonder his wings could lift him aloft.
Beside him, long and lean Jae, her skin a rich brown, appeared as insubstantial as air—until you noticed the razor-sharp throwing knives in her arm sheaths. She’d braided her curly hair into two side braids that began close to her skull and carried all the way down to the middle of her back.
She looked nothing at all like Ellie and she reminded Illium of her all the same. When he said, “Are those garrotes woven through your braids?” she grinned, and Maximus leaned in close to examine the lethal tools that once more put Illium in mind of Ellie.
“Forget about Jae’s obsession with hiding weapons,” Yindi said with the rudeness of long friendship. “News, gossip, breaking stories, we want it all.”
“We’re insulated here.” A freshly showered Xan, with a shirt on for once, threw back whatever deadly concoction was in his glass before continuing. “Not so much technologically—those links have been put back up, at least to a basic degree—but in terms of distance.”
“The amount of work doesn’t help,” Maximus said in a voice deep and rumbling, but it wasn’t a complaint. “We have little time to look to the outside when there’s so much to do to rebuild China, build our archangel’s land.”
“And we’re going to be building in truth soon,” Xan said, the warrior’s face bearing the refined beauty of an old vampire—the olive-gold of his skin so flawless as to be unreal, his cheekbones knife blades, and his lips delineated as if by a master artisan.
His eyes—thin, slightly hooded—gave him an enigmatic air, the entirety of Xan coming together to form a face so compelling that Xan only slept alone when he wished it.
“To tell my descendants that I helped build the court of an archangel?” Xan shoved a hand through the damp strands of his hair, broke out that berserker grin. “I will be even more of a legend than I am now.”
They all laughed, and Jae threw a bread roll at him—which he plucked out of the air and began to eat. Feeling at home among the friendly group, Illium updated them on how the other territories were doing, what had been rebuilt, what hadn’t. Additional senior members of Suyin’s court joined them in the minutes that passed, the conversation flowing with ease.
Yet still—and though he had his back to the door—he felt it when Aodhan entered the room. The others had left a space to Suyin’s right, and that was the spot into which Aodhan slid.
Because he was Suyin’s second.
Illium forced himself to keep his wings motionless, didn’t clench his fingers on the cutlery at hand, didn’t even look away from his conversation with Yindi to meet Aodhan’s gaze. The effort cost him, his abdominal muscles rigid and the tendons at his nape stiff.
“Mead?” It was a soft, feminine murmur at his shoulder.
He turned to smile at the mortal woman who’d appeared next to him, a jug in hand . . . and his heart, it stopped.
Kaia.
It was a roar of sound in his head, a thunder in his blood even though he knew Kaia was long dead and buried. But this woman, she had Kaia’s face, had her high, flat cheekbones, her soft lips, her wide and uptilted eyes, the long black silk of her hair. Only her skin tone was different. Kaia had been mountain born, her skin sun brown. This woman’s skin was white with a pink tint to it.